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"It's a common criticism of my works that I write about women whom I find admirable, but whom the audience dislikes."

That's what Hare writes about this play in the edition I read. I have watched the 1985 Meryl Streep film adaptation many times. It always spoke to me. Today, for the first time, I read the play, where I gained additional insights including within Hare's "A Note on Performance" where he recognizes the potential problems and discusses his intended goals.

He was right. The majority of audiences dislike Susan, in the play and film.

Susan is complex and her reactions are complex. In WWII she was an 18 year old member of Special Operations inside France, an experience that was so intense, so dangerous, and so worthwhile that show more nothing in ordinary post-WWII English life can compare. She will feel a void the remainder of her life. It will haunt her and yet always be an unnamed, maladapted never-resolved disappointment.

I honestly think, that if this had been presented as a story about a man's similar experience, (like the glimpse of Lazar's life near the end of the play) it would have been more empathetically received. And that is a major point. This is an incredibly perceptive depiction of one way that a highly intelligent, capable woman might attempt to cope with the loss of once having a profound purpose and comradery with the world. We aren't used to being made aware that women also had these kinds of war experiences. I read Hare wrote this play because 75% of women who were in Special Operations divorced in the immediate post war years.

Something significant in their expectations had changed.

Susan is not mean or cruel or cold, although it seems that way to the men in the play. She is honest in a way few of us are, or at least were. Honesty can hurt and especially so, apparently, when coming from a woman to a man. Frankly, she wears her heart on her sleeve, in a way not easily recognized, probably not even by herself.

It might look like a hard heart, or like neurosis. But, goddamn, I admire her fight against utter banality. Futile as it might be, self-destructive as it might be, baffling and hurtful to her husband as it might be, her battle never has cruelty as its goal. Indeed, most of her recurring episodes are trying to wrangle some shred of a higher objective than the bourgeoisie status quo to which the world had gladly and easily slipped into after the war.

Was she ever successful? No.

Every time I've watched (and now have read) this play, my heart hurts a little more. show less

Probably Hare's best play, showing through the disillusionment of a female SoE agent how the fine clear morality of WWII descended in the 1940s and 1950s into compromises and dishonesty in English Society. Those who saw the premiere of this play at the National Theatre in 1978 are unlikely to have forgotten it.